Tube filling machines having the aforementioned construction are used for continuously guiding a supply of empty tubes to the machine through the work stations necessary for filling and sealing the tubes and for subsequently delivering the filled, sealed tubes to a further processing, e.g. packaging, means. For the transporting or conveying of the tubes within the tube filling station, use is made of a rotating conveying or transporting device in the form of a circular traveller, which has a turntable, or an oval traveller, which comprises a belt guided by means of at least two return pulleys, e.g. in the form of a toothed belt or chain. As the filling and sealing processes can only be performed on vertically upright tubes, the known conveying devices are mainly constructed in a horizontally rotating manner, and throughout the conveying operation through the tube filling machine the tubes are held in a vertical orientation. However, this leads to considerable disadvantages at the supply station, where the empty tubes are inserted in the conveying device, because the empty tubes are taken from a magazine, where they are generally received in a horizontally lying form. Thus, the supply station contains a righting device for the tubes, by means of which each tube must be drawn up from the horizontal orientation into the vertical orientation before it can be inserted in the conveying device.
In the removal station located at the end of the rotating conveying movement and where the filled tubes are removed from the tube filling machine and passed on in a lying, horizontal orientation, it is once again necessary to bring the tubes from the vertical orientation into the horizontal orientation. This double modification to the tube orientation is complicated from the equipment standpoint, and therefore is expensive, particularly in the case of multipath tube filling machines, where several tubes must be simultaneously supplied. This also gives rise to a potential fault source during the operation of the tube filling machine. This is, inter alia, linked with the fact that, generally, swivelling V-blocks are used, which hold the tubes with vacuum and which react sensitively to non-circular tubes. During tube discharge, deflection usually takes place in free fall, with subsequent sliding off of a transfer plate. Fault susceptibility can be increased by friction fluctuations due to contamination or dirtying.
The problem object of the invention is to provide a tube filling machine avoiding the aforementioned disadvantages and enabling the orientation of the tubes to be adapted in a simple manner.